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Grand jury calls five more officers to testify on shooting

Joe McDonaldOf The Morning Call

Two more Easton police officers were here to testify before a grand jury on Thursday and three others are scheduled today in the probe into the fatal shooting of officer Jesse Sollman inside police headquarters in March and a burglary in the department in July.

One of Sollman's best friends, Sgt. Michael Vangelo, and police union Vice President Charles McMonagle were subpoenaed to testify Thursday before the panel. More than a dozen officers already have appeared before the grand jury.

Three more officers, Capt. Michael Gibiser, and two detectives, Joseph Nunes and James Krome, are scheduled to testify today before the grand jury.

Nunes investigated the burglary in the chief's executive suite offices and Krome was one of the officers who went to the room where, police have said, Sollman was fatally shot on March 25 by officer Matthew Renninger.

The break-in investigation was later referred to the state attorney general's office, which is investigating the Sollman shooting.

Renninger has been on paid administrative leave since the shooting. The grand jury has heard testimony from more than a dozen police officers as part of its investigation into how Sollman was shot and whether charges should be filed.

Gibiser has said he took a statement from Renninger as part of an internal police investigation into the shooting that led him to believe the shooting was an accident.

The grand jury began hearing testimony in the Sollman case on July 11, beginning with members of the Special Weapons and Tactics team. Sollman and Renninger were SWAT members and they were in a gun- cleaning room after a day of training on the firing range when Sollman was shot.

Four days before the first round of officers were scheduled to testify, someone broke into the police chief's executive office suite, pried open a file cabinet and riffled through a file marked "Sollman."

Two weeks later, the SWAT team was disbanded. The decision so angered Dominick Marraccini, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Washington Lodge 17, that he cursed at then-Police Chief Stephen A. Mazzeo.

Marraccini was suspended without pay for the tirade. Last month, Mazzeo was forced into retirement by Mayor Phil Mitman, who said he wanted a new chief to straighten out the 62-member Police Department, which has been under a seemingly nonstop barrage of embarrassing incidents and police brutality suits that have cost the city millions.

The day after Marraccini was suspend by Mazzeo for cursing at him, Marraccini and McMonagle went to the mayor's office and spoke with his chief of staff, who captured their comments in a memo to the mayor.

In the memo, Stu Gallaher said the officers had guaranteed labor peace for the next 21/2 years if Mazzeo were fired and the department was run by Capt. Scheldon Smith.

Last month after Mazzeo was forced into retirement by Mitman, he was replaced at least temporarily by Smith.

After the memo became public, Mitman said his administration did not take the union up on its labor peace offer and said there was "no quid pro quos" in getting rid of Mazzeo.